A review of tonight’s “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” coming up just as soon as my diet consists of flavorless beige smoothies…
Now that was more like it. After a couple of episodes with weak Peralta stories, “Road Trip” was a half-hour where all three plots clicked.
The title story revisited the ongoing Jake and Amy tension without pushing too hard on it, and did it in a way I can’t recall many shows doing. Usually in a “will they or won’t they” situation, one partner pines after the other at a time, going back and forth due to circumstance, always being miserable in silence. Here, neither Jake nor Amy has the guile to stay quiet about how they feel for very long. So even if the larger framework is similar – with Amy dumping Teddy while Jake and Sophia are still together and reasonably happy – each party knows that the other one likes them, and he can even turn it into yet another thing to tease her about. And because it’s been established that Jake teasing Amy is the default mode of their friendship, this winds up being reassuring rather than cruel.
(Also? Jake’s reactions to the Room of a Thousand Dolls were hilarious every time.)
Boyle isn’t paired with Captain Holt that often, but the two make an excellent contrast in temperament: Boyle too emotional about everything, Holt a utilitarian robot who sees no value in the thing Boyle cares about most. (It’s not quite the Leslie Knope/Ron Swanson dynamic, but it’s in the ballpark.) Watching Boyle struggle to get Holt to appreciate any of the finer details of cooking (or even eating) was terrific, and I loved his response to discovering the captain’s innate culinary talent: “Now I know how Salieri felt!”
If Diaz’s cold had just given us Terry talking of his love of kreplach… dayenu, but it also gave us the unsettling and very funny display of what Rosa’s like when she’s hopped up on cold medicine. Stephanie Beatriz usually commits so thoroughly to Rosa’s cold deadpan that it can be startling to see or hear her in any other mode, but this one in particular.
What did everybody else think?